Digital analytics and key concepts - Google Analytics Tutorial

- [Instructor] So, what do we mean by digital analytics? Well, analytics is all about measuring your business goals, understanding your performance, and finding ways to optimize and improve that performance. And the critical part here is the continuous improvement. After all, we're not here to just look at pretty pie charts for the sake of fancy reports. We want to actually do something about it. So digital analytics is also a process. We first perform the measurement, for we can't manage what we can't measure. And then we apply the analysis, and we learn from what we see, and then we take action. Now, before we jump right into the Google Analytics tool, it's important that we first go over some key definitions, as I firmly believe that knowing the vocabulary is half the battle of learning any new subject. Understanding these concepts is going to give you a head start, knowing how to manipulate and interpret the data available, not just in Google Analytics, but really any analytics tool. So the first two concepts, you're going to be hearing about a lot in this course, are metrics and dimensions. These two variables make up all of the data populated in the analytics reports. Now metrics are the quantitative numbers that are measuring data in counts, ratios, percentages, and so on. Dimensions are the qualitative categories that describe the data in segments or breakouts. So for example, in this particular table, the dimensions are the countries that describe the data segments, and the metric is the count, in this case, the number of visitors. Now, when we think about digital analytics, we're measuring the interactions, the engagements between us and the consumer, the person who's visiting our site or our mobile application or whatever digital experience we're providing. And the most basic unit of that measurement in Google Analytics is the event. As marketers, we may think of events as things you attend; a webinar or a product launch. That's not at all we're talking about here. Here, an event just refers to any one interaction. For example, if you click on a link, you scroll a page, you zoom into a product, or even if you just load a page. Those are all types of events. It can also be more complex interactions like completing an e-commerce transaction, or submitting a form, or even when our site has an error and something goes wrong, called an exception. All of those interactions can be sent back to Google as events. And the type of event is described as a parameter to that event. We'll go into this a bit more detail later but since events are the backbone of how this all works, I want to point out their structure. So each event has a name. As you see here, we have a bunch of page_view events, and then a scroll event at the bottom. Inside of each of these page of events, we have several parameters. These are going to provide more details about those events such as the page_location, which is just the URL, or the page_title, or even the screen_resolution. Now all the way at the bottom, for the scroll event, we have the time in milliseconds to get to that bottom scroll point. And lastly, we have the actual value that is going to be recorded for that event parameter. So for the page_location parameters that are of the page_view events, we have the URL. For the value of the resolution parameter, that's part of the page_view event, we have 1920 by 1200. Again, we're going to see a bit more of this later. I just want to induce the idea that almost all of the data sent back to Google Analytics is going to follow this event parameter and value model. Now, we can group together all of the events in a given timeframe. And we're going to call that collection a session. Here in GA, a session is the collection of interactions that are taking place between when a visitor enters your site or your app, and when they exit. And we used to call this a website visit but now that we can include apps as well, a session is really the more accurate term. We define an exit by when you let your browser, or app, go dormant for 30 minutes or if you exit out entirely. However, if a user leaves your site but they keep browsing, and then they return back to your site within 30 minutes, they're actually still counted as part of that original session, because it hasn't been 30 minutes and they haven't closed the browser. Now, next, we have this idea of the user. Now these are the people who are visiting your site. In Google Analytics, each event and session is going to be associated back to a user. Google has three ways that they're going to identify a single user, either the cookies on the browser, if they have really nothing else to go on, the next best up is if you've logged into their service. So via Gmail, Android, Google Docs, some way that Google can identify you. Lastly, and probably most specific, is that we can provide a specific ID to Google. So usually from a login on our own site, if we have one. Now ideally, this allows us to be able to track a single user with those multiple sessions, even if those are on different devices like a phone, a laptop, and a tablet. Now, a group of users who all share a similar dimension or fall under a similar category can make up a segment. Segments can be divided by things like physical location, the type of device that's being used, the traffic source users coming from, basically, any way that we can differentiate those users. We can create a segment for that. Now, this is a really important concept to understand. So we're going to discuss this in a dedicated video later in the chapter. I mentioned before, about how analytics is all about measuring your business objectives. When a user completes an action that you wanted them to take, any action you want to define as a success, we're going to call that a conversion. We define these conversions through goals in analytics, so that we can identify and record when this conversion takes place. Now it could be completing a purchase, but also just clicking on a particular link, or downloading a document, or completing a very specific form I want to track, or even just spending a certain amount of time on the site. You get to decide what you are calling conversion. And we're going to use these conversions to measure which of the users have successful visits. Then analyze how they got to the site, what content they saw, and other things that can help us better understand our converting customers. Now, speaking of tracking the source of that traffic, the two most important things we track there are called the source and the medium. The source is where the user traffic originated from. And the media is the avenue that the traffic took to get from the source to your site. For example, let's say a user was scrolling through Twitter and clicked on a post that linked to your site. The source of the traffic would be Twitter, that's the who. And the medium they took was the social, that's the how. We want to see which sources and mediums are sending us the best and most converting traffic. And the overall process of assigning that credit to sources when this conversions happen is called attribution, as we are attributing those conversions to those sources. Now often, that customer journey from start to conversion can involve several sources and several sessions, and various content pieces on your site. And proper attribution analysis will tell us which of those touchpoints along the way was having the greatest influence on a successful outcome. This is a really important topic to consider. And although we won't be going into a ton of detail, here in this course, we do have another course that is specifically about attribution in media mix model. And it covers it in full detail. And we went over these terms a bit quickly. But don't worry, we'll discuss them all in more detail. And you can always refer back to this video for reference.